Here's a Summer Story Song playlist compiled for the August/September ever-engaging Perspective magazine. Read on to find out why I find lyrics with a strong narrative thread so compelling...

Words, when hitched to a good tune, were what turned me into a music nut and I admire songcraft above almost anything in this world. This is not to say I don’t like a good groove – of course I do, and the stack of King Sunny Ade LPs currently on rotation to celebrate the summer sunshine proves it, because I still don’t understand a word of Yoruba.

Story songs in particular hold a special place in my heart. I blame Bob Dylan. My wife blames Bob Dylan too... for just about everything. I bought my first copy of Blood on the Tracks when I was fifteen, having been captivated by the narrative of Tangled Up in Blue, which I’d heard on the radio one dismal Sunday afternoon. Each of the album’s tracks was like a mini movie, from the unspooling western of Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts to Simple Twist of Fate which, people say, recounts the story of Dylan’s love affair with Joan Baez. It’s

Here's the original and much extended draft of a piece I wrote on The Clash which appeared in the February 2023 issue of Perspective Magazine.

Sometimes, when I am introducing myself, I say that my life was never quite the same after seeing The Clash. This is of course nonsense - like most or our self-made narratives - but it is serves as a useful shorthand to convey that I am of the punk rock generation, that I like a certain grittiness to my music, that I am political and that I have a rebellious streak. Most of all, I hope that it signals that I am definitely not be mistaken for a hippy, despite being a bona fide whale hugger.

Of course, The Clash were not above a certain amount of self-mythologising themselves: in fact, they were not embarrassed.to trade under the tag line of ‘the only band that matters’ – a conceit that is perhaps second only to the Rolling Stones’ boast of being the ‘world’s greatest rock’n’roll band’.

Seeing The Clash for the first time did not really deliver an epiphany but it was significant - a marker of sorts. In October 1981, I was eighteen,

Guest blog from WHC friend and artist, Simon Meiklejohn, on Bleached - Vulgar Earth's exhibition of coral-related artworks by various Vulgar Earth artists that have come into being through a unique collaboration with scientists from the Coral Reef Laboratory of the University of Southampton

The ocean attracts us all. There is nothing more other-worldly than to sit on a moonlit beach and to stare out at the twin alien worlds of space and ocean. Most of us live out our lives on land, and only ever occasionally cross, or visit the edges of those vast alien, watery places we think of as separate and other to us. But in truth, our world is an ocean world, and we are just a small part of it.

Within this vast hidden world today’s coral reefs have existed for some 25 million years, a thousand times longer than modern humans. Coral reefs cover less than 1% of the ocean floor but this fact belies their global significance. For coral reefs, in all their intricate and beautiful diversity are the nurseries of the ocean. It has been estimated that about 25% of the ocean's creatures depend directly or indirectly on healthy coral reefs. Furthermore, over

The singer/writer/performer/director/campaigner remembered by her son-in-law Richard Page

Born in Oregon, on the 29^th July 1938, Bettina Jonic sometimes jokingly referred to herself as a ‘bohunk’ with a degree of pride in her peasant roots. Her mother had arrived in America from the island of Dugi Otok, the largest of the Dalmation islands west of Zadar, young and illiterate but determined, a trait her daughter inherited.  Somehow Bettina’s mother arranged her own marriage to another Slav. Bettina’s father, a kind man, worked as a logger in Oregon and as ship’s cook on a Californian tuna fishing boat living the nomad life of the character in Bob Dylan’s Tangled Up in Blue. A heavy drinker, Bettina’s father became a gutter alcoholic who the young Bettina would step across the road to avoid out of embarrassment.

But Bettina’s mother was not to be dragged down, she moved to LA and fixed her immigrant eye on pursuing the American dream. Her hard graft combined with a shrewd business sense enabled her to progress from working as a cook in someone else’s restaurant to having her own diner. She built the business up to the point that she was able to acquire

Looking forward to the live stream event by Patti Smith at 3pm EST / New York time today (ticket details here). I didn't have much pre-planned this year (just as well hey?) but had bought tickets for one of her scheduled Albert Hall shows and so this is a stop-gap.

This photo was taken in July 2014 when I tracked her down after spotting a concert poster in Tromso, Norway. I was in town with some colleagues to join the Greenpeace Esperanza for an expedition to Svalbard

as part of the Save The Arctic campaign. Patti was there to play a relatively low-key show at Bukta Music Festival amid a sea of ordic metal bands. After much emailing and a few calls and being snet round the houses, I was put in touch with her bass player then acting road manager, Tony Shanahan, who told me to meet him and Patti at a hotel where she was doing an exclusive press interview. Tony spotted us in the lobby and introduced us to Patti who invited us up to the suite to listen ot the interview and afterwards we could talk and I would invite her to sign the International

A week ago Big Al was felled by a heart attack. I, like many others, will miss his warm-hearted company and he has loomed large in my thoughts this past seven days.

While not a regular attendee at Wild Hare Club events, Alastair helped quite a bit over the years, not least by always being happy to take a bundle of flyers and posters and distribute them around Hay and beyond. Whenever he did roll up, I knew immediately that the night would be all the better for both his company and an ever-helping hand. One birthday he presented me with a rope bag filled with heavy duty builders’ clips – incredibly helpful for putting up drapes and banners – and now an essential piece of kit. A life of putting on events, meant that he spotted things that needed doing and addressed them without a fuss.

I am trying to remember when and where I first met Alastair and can’t pin it down exactly, strange for someone so striking but it was a long time ago - close on 40 years I reckon. Alastair was a friend of my sister, Gilly and her other half, Dave, and a regular

Never let it be said that the Wild Hare Club is short on thrills and spills!

The humble t-shirt has become staple in most people’s wardrobe and ever since people started printing pictures and text on them, they have become a means of self-identification and expression.

Some people even talk about t-shirt culture and earlier this year The Fashion and Textile Museum ran an exhibition titled T-shirt: Cult - Culture – Subversion featuring design classics. T-shirts often convey cool and now there are various companies selling ‘As worn by’ t-shirt designs i.e. copies of t-shirts previously worn by icons. For instance, it is possible to buy a Camp Funtime t-shirt as worn by Debbie Harry in her heyday.

Almost everyone reading this will have a favourite t-shirt. Evan Dando of the Lemonheads wrote this song, Favourite T, which touches on the sometimes deep personal attachment with this simple cotton garment. I have had lots of favourites including one from the first WOMAD festival in 1982 which is so faded it resides at the back of the back of the drawer. I am unlikely to ever wear it again but am loathe to bin it.

Of the few Wild Hare Club t-shirts, my favourite is the one designed by Beki Warren and lovingly screen-printed by

On Christmas Day, Shane MacGowan turned 60 much to the surprise of yours truly and many others. To celebrate the fact the Irish Government has honoured this extraordinary lyricist and songwriter with a lifetime achievement award and an all-star bash was held in Dublin's National Concert Hall on Monday 15th January, excerpts from which can be found on Youtube.

Shane and The Pogues have a special place in my heart for many reasons. I first encountered him when he was working Rocks Off record shop in Hanway Street an alley that cuts a corner between Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road. There used to be an all-night drinking dive in Hanway Street as well as two scuzzy record shops; these days it’s all been cleaned-up and the only reason you might go there for is Bradley's Spanish Bar and its still tremendous jukebox.

There was something about Shane that I can still remember the first record he sold me – an early single by Echo and the Bunnymen which from his expression he didn’t think much of. Next time I went in, he was hunched over the shop’s record deck playing Chinese Rocks by The Heartbreakers and talking animatedly

Campaigning poet, Heathcote Williams, died on 1^st of July and he and his continual flow of words and other work will be missed by many, including me.  Age didn’t mellow him and, given the turbulent times we are currently living in, there is more need than ever for dissenters who aren’t afraid to call-out the power-hungry and the corrupt for their actions, the actions that trample over others and are tearing the natural world apart.

My one and only encounter with Heathcote Williams was at the Elephant Fayre in 1984.

The Elephant Fayre was a small festival that ran on the Port Eliot estate of Peregrine Eliot, 10th Earl of St Germans between 1981and 1986. It was a magical little festival where everybody seemed to be adding to the festivities in one way or another with music as only one element. I went twice, the first time in 1982. I arrived on the back of a motorbike, my last hitched ride from London, and for the final mile found myself flanked by a legion of Hell’s Angels who then roared off in spectacular fashion. The festival was wonderful, a strange mix of hippies and proto-goths, the latter group having

Everybody knows the story of my meeting with Patti Smith but she’s not the only one of the artists of the New York underground scene of the late 1970s who I’ve met. Yes, of the CBGB centred scene-makers, I’ve also talked to John Cale and Richard Hell, exchanged grunts with Tom Verlaine and hung with Lenny Kaye. OK I confess to having engineered these encounters, mainly by blagging my way backstage, but my coming face-to-face with the Queen of NYC cool, Debbie Harry, that was totally unexpected.

Back in the early1990s like many other over-educated and underemployed graduates brought up on the NME, I gravitated - i.e. sank - to finding a job in Record and Tape, aka Music and Video. This chain of grimy second-hand shops started in Notting Hill Gate and ended up having many branches across London, later diversifying to selling ‘vintage’ clothes and other stuff.  Which name the chain’s staff and customers refer to it as is a clear indication of their age, though both names are dated now. The shops were squalid places and not unlike the shop described by Nick Hornby in High Fidelity, staffed by people who were generally misanthropic and who

A musical extract from the 2012 Senegalese travelogue, in which your foreign correspondent talks about Joe Strummer and recalls a visit to legendary Dakar club, Just 4 U.

Joe Strummer was on a roll just before his untimely death in 2002.  He and his band, The Mescaleros, had really hit their stride, playing music that perhaps actually deserved to be branded ‘world  music’, a rough mix of influences and musical styles.  A new kind of folk music for the 21^st century perhaps.  In their last few live sets the band was playing a new song Dakar Meantime. Sadly, or so I’ve heard, the band laid down the music for the song in the studio, so it could be included on their next album but Strummer never got to record the vocal track.   Consequently the song, which was considered to be one of their best, did not appear on the posthumous Streetcore.  I have never heard Dakar Meantime, only read about it, but know in my bones that had I been at one of those final joyous gigs, I would have been grinning from ear to ear.  I don’t know whether Strummer ever visited Dakar or whether

A short piece on a not-well-known '60s singer, record collecting, life on the ocean wave and the kind of talk that goes on around the WHC HQ kitchen table.

Picture this, we’re in the big kitchen, that’s brother-in-law, Dave, friend and his fellow woodworker, Tim, over from France and myself. It’s fairly late, they’ve been drinking and proffer me a glass of better than the normal red from a bottle presumably brought over by Tim. The conversation soon turns to music, as it so often does, and Tim starts telling me about this singer he really loves but who is not widely known these days, Judy Henske. Her name rings a bell but no, I don’t know her work.

Tim describes this beautiful beatnik singer and her deep bluesy voice and how much he loves a live record by her that features a song Hooka Tooka, a chant with nonsense, nursery rhyme words.

Tim sings a bit - Hooka Tooka soda cracker, does your mama chaw tobacca?- and then tells me that on the record Judy introduces the song with a bit of spiel about its supposed origins as a song which the street kids would start singing

Or why it’s worth paying the price on the ticket.

Not long ago I was listening to The Staple Singers classic When Will We Paid, a piece of southern gospel-tinged soul of the kind that often rings through WHC HQ, a style of music that I find irresistible and sometimes deeply moving. The lyrics are about how the Afro-American population has consistently been paid less and massively exploited, a situation sadly not much changed since the song was written, as anyone who has dug into the context of the ongoing unrest in many US cities will already know. (See for instance this Huffington Post blog on why the Baltimore riots didn’t just start with the death of Freddie Gray while in police custody). However, as I was listening to the song I thought the words could equally apply to the lot of the itinerant musician and the direct experience of Pops, Mavis and the rest of the musical Staples family before they got their break.

Music is magic, it transports us, lifts our spirits and sometimes even makes us want to get up and dance. Music weaves into our lives in unexpected ways, it’s always there and I

The other day I caught a snippet of Joe Strummer talking on the radio (an archive show) about how the visual identity of The Clash was almost as important as the music. As mentioned in my previous blog on 40 years of punk rock attitude, the visual creativity of that period fired me and many others up.

It’s why I still love records, the covers are/were often affordable pieces of art. I love gig posters too and whenever I am in a foreign city I am scouring the walls for the posters giving clues to the emerging and popular cultures particular to that place, i.e. the stuff that most tourists are oblivious too. It’s always an adventure finding a small club in a foreign country, taking you somewhere off the beaten track, especially if at the end of it you find a bunch of enormous Norwegian death metalheads preparing for Ragnarok.

For these reasons I like to put some effort and care into producing the artwork related to Wild Hare Club events and especially important for the upcoming punky reggae party.

The punk explosion was of course pre the days of personal computers and Photoshop and much of

One man’s account of Campfire Convention 001. Note, this is only the half of it. Each of the several hundred other people there will have their own stories, all to be shared, many, no doubt, around the campfire.

Many of you regular Wild Hare Clubbers will know that I have been banging on about Campfire for a while now. Well the time has come to report on the very first gathering - Campfire Convention 001 - which took place in and around The Bridge Inn at Michaelchurch St Escley last weekend. Like many others who were there, I am still getting my head around, (or in modern parlance processing for we are nothing if not digitally savvy us Campfire people), what was a very rich and very human experience.

Where to begin? Well the adventure really started when Stas (Mrs Hare) and I picked up Chrissie, a fellow volunteer crew member who we’d met at the June pre-meeting, and her seriously impressive pile of gear at Hereford Station on Thursday afternoon. Sharing a lift with people you don’t know so well is always exciting and it brought back memories of summers criss-crossing the country, hitching to festivals or to stay

Celebrate the 40^th anniversary of punk rock? The idea is of course ludicrous - I mean, punk as heritage? How ironic is that? But hey, I’m going to do it anyway by throwing a punky reggae party with my friends and fellow scene-makers from The Underground Revolution on 9^th September in Hereford to which you are all invited and here’s why.

1976 was a year zero of some kind - the nascent punk rock scene sparked off a cultural upheaval in this country at the fag end of the 1970s which smashed the rose-coloured Lennon lenses of the prevailing hippy worldview and inspired a whole generation of creatives with its incandescent energy. It wasn’t just musicians of course who got fired up by the scene, but future designers, writers and activists too. Our culture is still feeding off that energy even now. Take Dame Vivienne Westwood for example - hailed as a great British eccentric, icon and export, she is now held close to the bosom of the establishment and was touted as a symbol of Cool Britannia’s world-beating creativity. She wasn’t always thought of so fondly by the powers that be. It’s peculiar really, how the iconoclasts

To me a summer doesn’t seem quite right without having spent at least one long weekend under canvas at a festival with one night when you stay up until dawn, talking to someone you’ve only just met round the campfire.  However, the big festivals have lost their charm for me and it’s always the small and new events that the magic happens. I am particularly thinking back to the first Elephant Fayres held in Port Elliot where everybody contributed to the merriment in some way or another.  At the most memorable of my Elephant Fayres, we had a small food stall from which we sold a number of delicious foodstuffs including orange and cardamom ice cream.  Unfortunately, the generators went down and all the ice cream began to melt. Rather than have it go to waste, I was giving cones away, one of which h I handed to the poet Heathcote Williams.  In exchange he gave me a copy of his Elephant Newspaper which was later adapted for his book ‘Sacred Elephant’.  But I digress, for you, it’s probably somewhere else.

It was good news then, when, not so long ago, I heard murmurings of the Campfire Convention that

The Wild Hare Club can also be found on twitter @WildHareClub. Every so often I post links to songs that can be found in the boxes of great singles that I have collected over the years.  These #fave45s are gradually building up into a virtual jukebox that can be enjoyed at your leisure.

So here to whet your appetite is a list of 45 of my favourite 45s compiled to mark my 45th birthday.

These are not my 45 favourite singles of all time or a list that makes any claims beyond the fact that each of these records was special enough for me to shell out some hard earned cash - or in the case of some of them, precious pocket money.   The list is therefore decidedly retro.  All are tunes that may come out across the P.A. between bands at a WHC gig.

Obvious omissions in terms of favourite bands may be because I only have the songs on l.p.  - for example I never bought any Stones singles because I had the albums and a copy of ‘Rolled Gold’.  Similarly Blondie’s greatest hits is a party in and of itself.  Did I tell you about when